Hollywood's defender of `evil' stands up for his body count

`Natural Born Killers' was accused of inspiring murder but Oliver Stone has no regrets. Rhys Williams reports

One of several critical moments in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers comes in a scene towards the end of the film, when Mickey (played by Woody Harrelson), fresh from notching up a half century of murders, says to the tabloid journalist (Robert Downey Jr) interviewing him in prison for live network television: "A minute of my purity is worth a lifetime of your lies."

Stone's assessment of the media has scarcely improved since the making of the film. "Mickey, like Charles Manson, is much more honest with himself than the bullshit media that keep on putting out their lies and distortion," he said yesterday.

Following its release in the United States and on mainland Europe, the film was demonised for allegedly leading to 10 copycat murders. In Britain, several tabloids, particularly the Daily Mail, ran front-page headlines and leaders on "why this film MUST be banned from Britain".

The British Board of Film Classification suffered an attack of the jitters and delayed certification, pending further inquiry into supposed links between the killings and the film.

NBK was cleared in December. But the press for the most part chose to ignore the board's decision. So, when the film goes on general release this Friday, it may come as a surprise to one or two of the cinema going public that this "evil" and "destructive" film is appearing.

"The British press reaction was very hysterical," Stone said. "It really lived out the expectations of the film itself. The media behaved like a junk-yard dog - if Robert Downey had been a real-life journalist, then he would have been right in there leading the charge against the movie."

Rarely has a film been so vilified before its release. It tells the story of how dysfunctional Mickey meets dysfunctional and abused Mallory (Juliette Lewis), how they fall in love, embark on a cross-country killing spree and are transformed into celebrities by an exploitative, ratings-hungry tabloid media.

Shot in an extreme, hallucinogenic whirl of colour and monochrome, 35mm film and hand-held super 8, the action is intercut with animation, clips from Midnight Express and Scarface and images of Hitler, fire and blood. It is like channel-surfing without the remote control and, in parodying the MTV mentality, the film seeks to underline the symbiotic link between violence and the media.

Stone describes NBK as an immersion in "white trash American culture. It was like we vomited on to the canvas, like a Jackson Pollock. We wanted to create a mural, so we can look back at the Nineties when we're in 2030 and say this was a culture of hysteria and madness - media, police, prisons, killers, violence, violence, violence."

Natural Born Killers, he said, was "not a historical document, but a metaphorical truth that represents a decade of aggression, a culture that worships aggression and makes money from it". The film, he argued, should serve as an indictment of the media frenzy that makes prime-time television out of true-life crime.

One of Mickey's random shootings is presented as a voyeuristic television crime reconstruction. Before the end credits roll, Stone flashes up images of people who through their alleged or proved violence have become cult celebrities - O J Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding and the Menendez brothers. But in producing a film, a money-making venture after all, steeped in blood, Stone may be guilty of the charges he levels at the media.

"There's no way round that. You can dismiss me as a hypocrite, but that would be a case of killing the messenger because you don't like the message. Whether I'm a hypocrite or not is irrelevant to the result."

It is possible that however explicit the condemnation of the big bad media, some may not get past what is, in its stylised depiction, a sexy portrayal of violence.

"What's the harm in that? Then it becomes just another `shoot 'em up' film along the lines of True Lies or Speed."

And one with a significantly lower body count. Natural Born Killers may be thoroughly violent but the film is not exceptionally violent - there are 106 corpses in Rambo III and 264 in Die Hard 2.

The truth, Stone maintained, was that killers are pre- disposed to kill. "A movie can act as an instant ignition, as a flame, absolutely, but the condition is pre-existing. So what are we to do? Are we to say that movies cannot go into these darker areas, are we going to censor ourselves?

"I like to go out there and push the buttons to ex- plore the outer reaches. Certain film-makers are destined to explore the subversive, rebellious elements of our society."

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